The Interior DIYer
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Mahogany mirror hallway update

About a year and a half ago my parents gave us their mahogany mirror for safe keeping. Unfortunately, it went to waste for a long time and sat wrapped in the corner of our bedroom [as seen in this blog post] that is, until last week!

I had every intention to hang up said beautiful mirror, but I wasn’t sure exactly where to hang it. For a long time I thought about hanging it in our room, but I wasn’t 100% certain so it continued to sit. It finally dawned on me to hang it at the end of our hallway behind the front door. It was the perfect space for it! Long before we moved in our landlord stuck a cluster of IKEA mirrors to the wall behind the front door. They definitely were a functional addition to the hallway, but their charm had well and truly warn off in recent years. At the very least, they were impossible to keep clean.

It’s not too noticeable from this photo, but not all the mirrors were flush [to be honest, as we found out when hanging the mahogany mirror, the wall itself is not flat]. If you were standing in the hallway trying to use the collective cluster of mirrors to inspect your outfit, your knees may be left entirely out of the equation thanks to the different angles of the mirrors. There were many blind spots and some of the mirrors tilted outwards vertically leading you to believe you were wider than you actually were. Not something anyone, let along a pregnant woman, wants to see. You can kind of see this effect on the mirror Juniper appears on. 

Using a metal ruler, I carefully removed the mirrors by filleting the ruler behind each mirror and scraped the sticky pads off of the back of each mirror, one at a time. I sanded the leftover sticky marks and applied about 4 – 5 even coats of paint to the entire wall [those yellow marks proved tricky to hide]. I carefully stored each mirror on top of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom and will put them back in place when we eventually move out. 

Dad DIYer, along with help from Robert, hung the mirror last week and it has made such a HUGE change to our hallway. We’re no longer warped-looking when checking out our outfits and it’s such a welcome and more put-together addition to our hallway. Also, mahogany. When we grow up and have a real house ALL OF THE THINGS will be mahogany. 

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Nursery plans – part 1

Before I share the exciting side of my design ideas for the nursery, I first have to tackle the far less exciting side that is the spare bedroom as it is now and getting it from this point to an empty room. Sounds easy? It’s not as straight forward as I’d like it to be thanks to us being renters living with our landlords furniture and not having as much freedom as a homeowner would have. But I’ve successfully managed to come up with a solution to almost every problem.

Feel free to allow your eyes to glaze over while you scroll as chances are you won’t find the below particularly interesting. It’s a solution I’ve come up with as a renter so I figured maybe one other person out there might find it interesting, so here it is … 

1. DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING – and everything else on the walls. I’ve found so many cute things to hang up and have some fun ideas, but that can’t start until I repaint.
2. REPAINT – this is an obvious step but it’s something that needs to be done before I start working on the nursery. I just need to decide on a colour.
3. UNDER THE BED – four years’ worth of college work and the dismantled shelves from our living room [as in the ‘before’ photo here] have been expertly rammed stored under our spare bed. Out of sight, out of mind! That is, until we get to number 5 below … 
4. DECLUTTER – I’ll be doing another sweep of what we have at the moment and either selling or donating as much as I can. I’ve gotten rid of a lot over the past two years but thanks to nesting hormones, I want to get rid of everything unnecessary. 
5. DISASSEMBLE THE SPARE BED – since we’re renters and the bed in the spare bedroom is our landlord’s, we can’t get rid of it. My plan is to stack the spare mattress on top of the mattress in our bedroom, disassemble the spare bed and store it under our bed. I also have to relocate the college work and shelves that are currently under the spare bed to under our bed and hope it all fits.

6. CHAOTIC CUPBOARDS – possibly scarier than under the bed; the cupboards in our spare bedroom. They hold about half of everything we own. Our Christmas decorations, more college work, my wedding dress, a printer, our landlords artwork, old Playstations, summer / winter clothes, one hundred years of wrapping paper that’s too pretty to use and mementos to name a few. All have to be ruthlessly culled. 
7. MOAR SHELVES – this random set of shelves belongs to our landlord and sit awkwardly at the entrance to our spare bedroom creating a bottle-neck to the room [which will be v. awkward when bebe comes]. We keep our DVD collection on them at the moment, but I’m hoping to move the DVDs elsewhere and put these shelves within the cupboard [no. 6 above] so the shelves can house overflow bebe stuff that we won’t have room for in the room itself.

If you’ve read this far, I commend you! If you haven’t, I don’t blame you. That’s the plan I have so far to get the spare bedroom ready for its new design and subsequently, new occupant. I cannot wait to share the plans I have for the nursery! Not to mention get started on decluttering and organising and assembling tiny bebe things. 
And for good measure, I’ll end on an awkward selfie … 
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Lately + a bit of a rant

It’s been so long [for me] since I last blogged. It’s been 6 weeks since I last published something here and considering I’ve been blogging at least twice a week for the past 5 years, going 6 weeks without doing anything has been weird and a little scary. Work has been really busy as well as most of our spare time in general these days, so by the time I get home I usually have zero cares left to work on anything. 

Actually, truth be told, the reason I haven’t done much blogging is because anything I want to do around our apartment I can no longer do by myself. Which is a world of frustrating levels of bullshit. Yes, I realise I’m pregnant and I have to be careful, but I’m not someone who has ever had to wait for someone else to help me before jumping into a project [bar electrical stuff]. I’m not dainty and I don’t value my looks very much so in the past if something needed to be done, I’d get stuck in regardless of the physical harm that may come my way. I mean, when I swapped the two beds in our apartment, one of the beds [now in our bedroom] weighed, I shit you not, about 300lbs. Maybe even 400lbs. It’s solid wood and it needed to be turned on its side to be able to move it down the hallway. I did all of that solo. But now. Now that I’m with child. Oh sweet baby deity … Never have I been treated so much like a tiny injured bird and it makes me feel a spectrum of useless. I do realise I have to take it easy for the next few months, and I’m trying, but I really cannot wait until I am allowed to move something really heavy or do something by myself. It’s tough as when I get an idea I have to stop myself and say, “No, hold on. I have to wait for Robert to come home to move that for me.” So that’s partly why I haven’t been able to do much around our apartment, and subsequently, not been able to blog much. 
It’s a big learning curve for me so I’m trying to get used to asking for help. As of this week I’ve had a burst of wanting to get things done so the mahogany mirror that’s been sitting in the corner of our bedroom for more than a year [as seen here] is finally up and hanging in our hallway! Special thanks to Dad DIYer and Robert who hung it up earlier this week [I wasn’t allowed to help as it’s very heavy]. I’ve also been taking some pictures for a very exciting feature coming up so I’ve bought a few new things I’ve been eyeing for a while. One of them being this brass candle holder from Article, a few peonies from Appassionata and some new bedding … 

ME –          “I want to look at new sheets for our room today.”
ROBERT –  “We need new sheets? But we already have sheets and a duvet on the bed.“
ME –          “We need new sheets. Sheet-sheets.”
ROBERT –  *Total confusion*

We got new sheets in the end.